Here I Am

On Wed, 23 Jan 2002, emanuel stiebler wrote: Yeah, the assertion that porting to a wider variety of platforms decreases overall stability isn't necessarily correct. One of the goals of NetBSD is to run on as many platforms as possible. What I've learned through my involvement with NetBSD over the past few years is that this wide support of platforms is now only secondary to a more significant /root/ philosophy of the OS development efforts, and that is the focus on the design of highly portable code. The end result is that the various kernel subsystems are clean and extremely well abstracted-- especially in comparison to the competition. Code reuse across the platforms is higher than I've seen anywhere else. It's still not perfect, but it strives to be as point of principle. The process of throwing as much different hardware at NetBSD as possible also means that the OS gets exercised in significantly more ways than any other system out there. This is a great way to find portability and design flaws quickly. Additionally, the constraints you face in trying to create a middle ground between all the systems, with a relatively small group of people, forces you to use good software development practices. It's a huge task to span from the support of 0.9 MIPS MicroVAX-IIs to that of the fastest Alpha and Pentium processors. The NetBSD code has evolved to deal with damn near anything. I think taking this long-view will serve to the advantage of NetBSD in the future. -brian.